Michael Peachin has written
a more
wide-ranging book than either its title or publication venue might
indicate. In Iudex vice Caesaris, P. attempts no less than to
explain the Roman legal system and the changes in how appeals were lodged
from the late republic to late antiquity. He demonstrates a mastery of
legal, literary, epigraphic and papyrological sources in describing both
these changes and the development of an official appointment for someone
to dispense justice in place of the emperor.

The book is organized
into four main chapters but roughly falls into two halves. The first half,
comprising the first chapter, will prove the most interesting and easily
comprehensible to the general reader. In it, P. sketches the growing role
of the emperor in the creation and interpretation of law. By the Severan
era, the jurist Ulpian could proclaim that whatever the emperor wanted had
the force of a law (from Digest 1.4.1.pr.). Combined with the
emperor's personal authority in making law was the gradual replacement of
the binding arbitration of formulary legal procedure with the cognitio
extra ordinem, first introduced by Augustus and allowing both greater
flexibility in how cases were tried and the opportunity for appeal to the
emperor.

Another fragment of Ulpian (Digest 49.1.1.pr.) is
used to examine the grounds for appeal, namely a given judge's unfairness
(iniquitas) and/or inexperience (imperitia). In a society
organized through patronage, the unfair judge would not be uncommon, and
the sources are replete with examples. P. has more extensive comments
concerning the issue of inexperience.

In the debate over the level
of professionalism within Rome's governing elite, P. steers a judicious
(if one may use the word) middle course between those scholars who believe
social standing alone determined selection for office and those who see
ability as a significant factor. Officials called upon to make legal
decisions might not necessarily have been familiar with all the principles
of law. In Rome this situation would have been corrected somewhat by the
availability of jurists to assist officials hearing cases, but many
provincial governors might well have lacked the assistance of experienced
legal minds. As imperial pronouncements came more and more to form the
basis of legal decisions, it became the duty of a judge to identify and
verify those pronouncements relevant to his case, a task made all the more
difficult by the lack of an official collection until the reign of
Diocletian. P. argues that errors from ignorance and inexperience must not
have been uncommon when judgments were given, leading to an ever
increasing load of appeals to be handled by the emperor.

The
complaints of jurists like Ulpian notwithstanding, the institution of an
appellate system will itself lead to an ever increasing caseload, as the
United States Federal Courts have discovered. While P. pays particular
attention to error as a cause for appeal, he is aware that in a
hierarchical government and society such as in ancient Rome, authority
will concentrate at the top of the hierarchy, and so, too, must dispute
resolution wander to the source of highest authority.

All this
discussion about appeals is preparation for the second half of P.'s book,
which attempts to examine the official appointments of individuals to give
judgments in place of the emperor. Made up of one chapter on
prosopography, another interpreting the prosopography, a third examining
Constantine's legal reforms and, finally, five appendices, the rest of the
book is far more technical in content and less narrative in style.

Despite the daunting nature of the presentation, P. makes his case for
seeing the establishment of an official appointment for a substitute
imperial judge as an innovation of Septimius Severus. The appointment
seems to have been an ad hoc measure to continue to have appeals
heard in Rome when the emperor was away or to allow appeals to have been
heard in the provinces (and especially in the East) after periods of
regional instability. Under Constantine, the authority to hear appeals was
expanded and became part of the responsibilities of various top officials:
urban prefects, praetorian prefects, governors of Africa and Asia,
vicarii and comites.

P. recognizes that his
discussion is greatly restricted because it is constructed from but 14
examples of such imperial substitutes over a period of slightly more than
a century. Most of the evidence for these appointments is epigraphic, and
there seems initially to have been no standard title until more than
halfway through the third century, when iudex sacrarum cognitionum
may have become the name of the appointment. Care is taken in the
discussion of the various careers of these 14 examples, and P. willingly
offers proposals to solve problems presented by the evidence. He should be
praised for his extensive effort, although scholars may find some of his
proposals worthy of reexamination. Certainly the connection of Zosimus
1.19.2 with Codex Justinianus 2.26.3 (in constructing the career of
P.'s example 8, Severianus, pp.119-20) must be considered highly
conjectural.

Nonetheless P. has produced what for some time to
come will remain an important work on the development of the appeals
system in the Roman empire. Iudex vice Caesaris is a book of
impressive scholarship deserving a place on the bookshelves of students of
Roman history and law.